this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Yeah...Great...
How about building public transport and not such stupid things?
Self driving cars could actually be kind of a good stepping stone to better public transit while making more efficient use of existing roadways. You hit a button to request a car, it drives you to wherever, you need to go, and then gets tasked to pick up the next person. Where you used to need 10 cars for 10 people, you now need one.
Thats still only a few people.. compared to a bus?
Why not just have a bus??
I take the bus to work every day. It's a set route for my set work schedule and it's great.
But everything else I do in my life? Not on a bus route, schedules are slow on the weekend or stop completely after a certain time.
When you come up with a bus that goes wherever I want to go when I want, I'm in. Until then, a car that doesn't require a driver and is easily shared between many people to take them the last mile is an actual solution.
Buses suck because they're like cars only worse.
Cars suck because of the amount of infrastructure you have to build for them all to avoid proper design of anything.
In a well designed area, you'd be able to get wherever you needed without having to take either of these things.
Uber
You mean like a self driving Uber?
Why is that necessary?
Sure you might have a lower number of cars total, but you'll also have way more cars on the road, making the traffic problem even worse (because you can now have more cars than people). I'm guessing we'll be seeing legislation that disallows empty cars driving around in big cities.
I don't think it would necessarily mean more cars. It means that your car takes you to work but instead of sitting in the parking lot whole day it drives other people around making you money and then at the end of the day it takes you back home and perhaps then goes back to being a taxi for the night.
You won't own the cars. The cost alone would be prohibitive, but operation and maintenance is far better done by an organization rather than an individual.
And there's almost no way a modern (feudalistic) car company will allow you to use your car this way to earn money.
The corporate masters are already not so keen on paying you when you are actually driving the thing. Do you really think they'll let you in on the racket?
Are these things in conflict somehow?
Yes, if there's any chance in hell of self-driving becoming feasible at scale it will involve pre-defined routes, possibly with other sorts of monitoring systems, and new infrastructure/mandatory equipment for safe pedestrian crossing zones after the first handful of school kids inevitably get plowed down thanks to the obviously-not-quite-there-yet image recognition systems.
Likely we'd see some rollback to a more achievable goal of a city-funded fleet of robo-taxis running pre-defined routes with standardized equipment and maybe some years into it, when we realize traffic jams still suck, start thinking "hmmm.... maybe we should've just improved our bus/rail systems..."
Cities are just as easily duped by guys like Elon Musk as any of these poor fuckers who died actually entrusting their lives to their shitty "autopilot" system. Especially when cities/officials stand to profit from kickbacks of various sorts. Don't assume something like this won't come at the cost of not investing in the obvious competing tech: public transport.
Indeed, we've had autonomous trains for 3 decades now, and without 'AI' to make things murky. Automation in airplanes and industry is also very advanced. The key to success is not in the software, but rather in overall system design.
They're already in conflict everywhere. Infrastructure for cars robs public transit infrastructure blind in lots of government budgets. The only public transit category potentially benefiting from car infrastructure is buses, which are arguably the worst form of public transit to begin with, and still also require additional dedicated infrastructure to get any better (e.g. dedicated bus lanes).
"Self-driving" cars obviously require car infrastructure which already steals from public transit budgets both federally and locally, but if we add government emphasis on this technology and start to develop specific infrastructure for "self-driving" cars (walled off routes, communications appliances, etc.) then they'll start taking even more of the budget.
And all of this for something that's arguably much more braindead and useless and consuming of R&D dollars than the obviously more efficient, already technically possible forms of transit that could be built or expanded upon today.
Yes
Because one of them costs taxpayer money and the other one is just signing legislation? The two concepts aren't even related other than that they are two different ways of getting to places.
Yeah because roads definitely don't cost taxpayers a single dime. 🙄
Public transport has been around for many decades. The US infrastructure and now lifestyle / culture is not built for it and there's not a great reason to think it's suddenly going to catch on. Self driving cars have real potential in the US to have an environmental impact as well save many thousands of lives each year. I wish you were more excited about this.
Well, we're not. There's a reason you don't see New York City jumping to adopt this tech, and it's because they bothered to invest in a public transit system that makes cars obsolete for a lot of people. If we got decent public transit in more cities combined with an actually functional high speed rail system in this country, you'd see cars become obsolete for a whole lot more people.
This "lifestyle/culture" developed out of sheer necessity given the geographic size of this country and the complete failure to invest in mass transit. It can and must be changed, if we want our future to be viable at all.
Your argument has been around for decades. This already could have been and "should" have been done. There's no cultural or tech change Now that's going to spur it all the sudden. This is like complaining about gun control. Of course it makes sense and would be better for US - that's blatantly obvious, but to kid yourself into thinking that therenis momentum for such a change is foolish. Self driving cars offer a real chance for change. Embrace.
While it is exciting, I can see both sides of the argument here. The infrastructure here in the US is built around cars so it would be much less effort to automate the existing infrastructure. On the other hand, things could be so much more efficient if we focused on trains and other public transport that excels at transporting a large amount of people. But that would take so much more effort and money to update the infrastructure.
Most SDCs in use currently are for public transport.
well, LA is building out a lot of light rail as of late at least